Construction Trend Tuesday covers one (hopefully) interesting industry trend in a quick, two-minute read. You can access the archive of CTT posts here.
In 536 AD, a volcanic eruption released a massive haze that blocked out the sun for much of the Northern Hemisphere. Temperatures plunged, it snowed all summer, crops failed, and people starved en masse. It was understandably thought to be the end of the world.
Last week evoked 536 AD for the data center industry.
First, data centers got clobbered at the polls. Virtually every ballot-measure moratorium passed, and gubernatorial candidates who ran on data center bans posted surprise wins in states like Texas and Georgia.
Investors freaked out about those results, and AI and data center stocks got hammered. The Nasdaq suffered its worst single day since the April 2025 tariff-related selloff.
Then Jensen Huang—the CEO of NVIDIA, the company at the very heart of the AI/data center boom—got caught having an affair with a customer, and that customer happened to be an alleged Chinese spy. Surely it’s a coincidence that Jensen has aggressively lobbied against export controls on chip sales for China over the past year and, uhh, maybe it’s a coincidence that NVIDIA intervened to stall a Commerce Department investigation into the company run by that Chinese spy.
So to sum it up: voters hate AI and data centers, markets got skittish about the investment supercycle, and the CEO of the company at the center of the AI buildout got honeypotted by an alleged Chinese spy.
Following 536 AD, things got way worse before they got better. Another volcano went off in 540 AD, compounding the agricultural crisis, and a plague in 541 killed millions more.
I don’t think the data center outlook is quite so grim.